B2B Branding With Attention Metrics

Over the past three years, brand-building has become a top priority for B2B marketers. The “95-5 rule,” coined by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, explains why: 95% of business clients aren’t in-market at any given time, making it crucial to establish a strong brand presence long before potential buyers are ready to purchase.

LinkedIn’s 2024 B2B Benchmark Report affirms this shift, with 67% of B2B marketing leaders increasing budgets for brand-building—more than double from the previous year—and nearly 9 in 10 CMOs advocating for bolder, more creative campaigns. 

As B2B marketers increasingly see brand-building as just as essential as lower-funnel tactics for sustainable growth, they face a persistent challenge: measuring brand impact, which is far more difficult than tracking leads or conversions.

Why Traditional Measurement Falls Short

B2B decision-makers are notoriously hard to reach and less likely to participate in surveys, forcing marketers to rely on narrow samples or expensive research for brand lift insights. Privacy regulations and evolving platform policies further complicate this by limiting the ability to connect ad exposures with survey responses. For B2B advertisers targeting smaller, niche audiences, these methods often deliver unreliable and inefficient results.

The Solution? Better Media Quality Metrics

Attention metrics refer to data points used to model consumer attention to both media placements and creative. For example, Adelaide’s AU metric combines signals from exposure data, eye tracking, and full-funnel outcome data to predict a placement’s likelihood of capturing attention and delivering results.

Unlike traditional methods that rely on user tracking to assess impression-level quality, AU evaluates quality at the placement level. By linking media quality directly to business outcomes, advertisers can focus their investments on placements most likely to drive brand impact. 

The result is a reliable, precise, and privacy-friendly, omnichannel metric that B2B marketers can use to identify high-impact media early, scale efforts, and ensure that campaigns meet both reach and performance goals. 

Benefits of Attention Metrics for B2B Advertisers

• Mass Reach with Digital Precision: Scale brand campaigns without compromising efficiency or overall performance.

• Transparent Media Quality—Upfront: Know a placement’s inherent quality before an impression is served, reducing waste on low-impact media. 

• More Impactful Media Investments: Ensure each placement provides the best (or most efficient) opportunity for your ads to get noticed. Leverage attention insights to inform planning, optimization, programmatic buying, and more.

• Omnichannel Consistency: Compare media quality across channels, formats, and devices with a precise, apples-to-apples rating. 

The Proof is in the Outcomes

B2B advertisers worldwide have integrated AU into their media planning and buying strategies, driving notable gains in both upper- and lower-funnel performance:

1. Professional Trade Association: After increasing average AU by 23%, this brand saw a 43% boost in Aided Awareness, 76% higher Ad Awareness, a 27% lift in Consideration, and a 73% improvement in Tagline Association compared to a previous CTV campaign. Further analysis revealed that high-AU audio placements drove a 190% increase in Consideration, while high-AU OLV media yielded a 45% uplift in Ad Awareness versus low-AU media (validated by Lucid/Cint).

2. Financial Services Provider: High-AU media led to a 99% increase in Favorability, 88% higher Consideration, a 69% boost in Purchase Intent, 65% higher Ad Recall, and a 25% lift in Aided Awareness compared to low-AU media (validated by Lucid/Cint).

3. Aerospace Company: High-AU media improved Conversion Rates by 34% over low-AU placements while reducing Cost per Conversion by 23%. AU optimizations through The Trade Desk Volume Control produced up to 33% more Conversions than the brand’s usual approach.

4. Global Power Management Firm: Display placements scoring 17+ AU delivered an 8.5x lift in Conversion Rate compared to lower-quality placements.

   
   

How to Get Started With Attention Metrics

AU measurement is easy and covers approximately 95% of a typical advertiser’s spend. Adelaide uses tagging and automated reporting ingestion to collect placement-level campaign data, which is processed by our AU model to generate precise media quality ratings. Advertisers use these insights to identify high-quality, low-cost placements and easily detect inefficiencies.

Eliminating the lowest-scoring 20% of placements—often representing 7 –10% of spend—typically doesn’t impact performance, but reallocating that budget to higher-AU placements has been shown to improve outcomes by 20 – 25%.

Programmatic solutions further scale and simplify the use of attention data in media buying and optimization. Adelaide has partnered with leading DSPs and SSPs to help advertisers dynamically target higher-quality media, avoid low-attention placements, and drive more efficient results. 

Three Ways to Activate Attention Data Programmatically

1. Attention-Based Pre-Bid Targeting: Advertisers select their desired AU quality levels directly in their DSP, ensuring they only bid on inventory that meets their criteria (e.g., “high AU”). This scalable method is the easiest to implement.

2. High-Attention Private Marketplaces (PMPs): Curated within SSPs, high-AU PMPs offer similar benefits to pre-bid targeting but require individual setup with each supply partner. 

3. Custom Bidding: Attention-based custom bidding intelligently increases bids on high-quality placements while reducing bids on lower-quality inventory. Although more complex due to the multitude of factors that influence impression value, this approach allows for highly granular optimization.

For more information on these solutions and how leading brands use them, download Adelaide’s Guide to Programmatic Activation.

Aligning Measurement With Brand Outcomes

By integrating attention metrics into their media measurement, planning, and buying frameworks, B2B marketers can spend confidently against reach goals, knowing their media will capture attention and drive impact—even in hard-to-reach segments. With real-time insights into what’s working, they can fine-tune their strategies, increase efficiency, and prioritize investments that drive better outcomes across the funnel.